The Death of the Cyberflâneur

Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by IsaacL on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @03:28PM (#12491416)

Here's a collection of jumping-off points to curious communities I've spent many a happy hour exploring:

http://ribbonfarm.com https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/ http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.co.uk/ http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ https://meaningness.com/ http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/

Enjoy :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by Analemma_ on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @03:53PM (#12491643)

We need a DARE program to warn unsuspecting children about people like you ;) LessWrong is a rabbit hole you'll never find your way out of.

Oh it starts off harmless. "I'll just read a couple", you say. But a year later you're mainlining SSC and pissing off all your friends talking about "virtue signaling". And then a year after that you're living in Berkeley, dating five people, and giving a third of your income to MIRI. Kids, just say no!

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Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by greenshackle on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @05:59PM (#12492622)

Well, dating five people if you're (mostly hetero) female; dating one or two people, who are each dating five people, if you're (mostly hetero) male.

Edit: Arguably, this is a better outcome than monogamy in a highly gender-skewed community (e.g. 1 in 2 het men dateless).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by Karrot_Kream on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @06:32PM (#12492795)

Source? (I'm not being argumentative, just genuinely curious if this is anything but anecdote.)

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Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by yummyfajitas on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @08:13PM (#12493323)

http://lesswrong.com/lw/lhg/2014_survey_results/

50% monogamous, 15% poly.

Every lesswrong group I've visited - in the US, Europe and India - had multiple polyamorous people present and discussing polyamory, so I'd be surprised if this poll is way off.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by unimpressive on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @09:45PM (#12493715)

Oh look at that, a perfect opportunity for me to plug that I ran the 2016 survey with updated results:

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nmk/2016_lesswrong_dias...

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nor/2016_lesswrong_dias...

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nqa/2016_lesswrong_dias...

http://lesswrong.com/lw/nx2/2016_lesswrong_diaspora_survey_a...

The one that concerns you is that LessWrong is now 18.2% polyamorous. This might just be an effect of increased scope of survey respondents though.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by greenshackle on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @10:11AM (#12497006)

Anecdote, i.e. me dating a girl with 3 boyfriends in the Bay Area.

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Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by whackedspinach on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @04:58PM (#12492177)

Please go back in time and invent this program. I definitely need to stop mainlining SSC.

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Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by gcr on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @08:12PM (#12493320)

Rationalist fiction is also tons of fun. Here's a great sample story from this community if you have an hour or so free: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-deep...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by nercht12 on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @04:04PM (#12491729)

Stop making me want to read it!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by ZenoArrow on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @04:48PM (#12492093)

Thanks for the links, I enjoy discovering sites with interesting content.

They probably wouldn't be classed as unknown/obscure, but I always seem to find something interesting on Brain Pickings and Colossal, worth a look if they're new to you:

https://www.brainpickings.org/

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/

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Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by cobber2005 on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @11:19AM (#12497807)

Principia Cybernetica introduced me to pantheism (not really a theism at all). It is wonderful that the internet still allows people to stumble upon things that can positively change their life, even if it is hard to find those things. It was probably harder to find such things before the internet.

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Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by bbctol on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @04:14PM (#12491818)

I've started collecting my weirdest links, though I'm not sure what to do with them yet. Hundreds of watercolors featuring Nazi war criminal Reynard Heidrich transforming into a female bird, a studio producing sexy anthropomorphized American warships that's started shifting towards Trump propaganda, a network of alt-right teenage girls' tumblrs, mostly based out of Nebraska, subreddits for conspiracy theorists focusing entirely on an unremarkable seeming dude who is apparently at the center of the new world order... the internet's weirder than it's ever been.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by yolesaber on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @04:35PM (#12491990)

Please post them on a pastebin. The alt-right tumblr and conspiracy reddit sound amazing

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by genericacct on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @06:58PM (#12492926)

Tumblr is full of weirdness, I would call it the modern velocities minus the 90s designs. And it gets even weirder on the chans and the deepweb.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by hood_syntax on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @04:44PM (#12492062)

Yeah, who is this seemingly normal guy? I want to know!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by emluque on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @06:04PM (#12492648)

I second this. That's really intriguing! I'm imagining that there is some random dude out there that somehow became the focus of some nutty conspiranoids and I can't stop laughing.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by Apocryphon on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @04:43PM (#12492055)

And here we thought Weimar Germany produced bizarre art.

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Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by pavel_lishin on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @09:48PM (#12493728)

You're sitting on about 100k worth of Reddit karma.

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Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by tvanantwerp on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @04:45PM (#12492073)

I used to enjoy visiting StumbleUpon and seeing what kinds of random places I'd end up. Then one day they asked me what kind of content I enjoyed, and wouldn't let me do anything else until I told them. Stopped going after that. I miss the ease of ending up somewhere totally unexpected that it once gave me.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by monknomo on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @02:58PM (#12491205)

I'm a fan of finding odd corners on the 'net, what's your technique?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by alva on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @03:32PM (#12491460)

I mostly find the odd places when searching on and for discussions of old stomping grounds. That usually leads me down a long path of links. Sometimes I discover by joining oddly named and sparsely visited IRC rooms. Occasionally great sites are posted to 4chan.

A recent discovery was made when looking for recent references to Temple Of The Screaming Electron. This search led me to two weird corners (potentially NSFW).

1. http://www.popeye-x.com/title123.htm As far as I can tell originally set up by a group of programmers (and I think phreakers, digging through the archives ), based in Texas with a common connection to a niche Austin based radio station. Highly original, deeply buried links, multiple hidden forums.

2. http://nobodytm.com Not even sure how to explain this one! Has a chat room that the owner sometimes frequents with cryptic messages that appear to mean something to other participants.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by monknomo on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @05:03PM (#12492210)

Deep forum links on weird topics is my goto, but IRC may be something I should get back into.

I kinda miss the web being made of forums, I feel like that's a tradition that's less healthy than it was. Facebook groups or slack channel or Stack Exchange just don't do it for me the same way

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Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by pyre on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @06:20PM (#12492732)

> Deep forum links on weird topics is my goto

What about this?

http://miketysontattoos.blogspot.ca/2011/06/quotient-rule-di...

Not quite a forum link, but I really couldn't figure out what the purpose of that site was. Some sort of spam/seo seeding operation? Where does the source material come from.

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Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by monknomo on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @06:17PM (#12501678)

That is crazy stuff. Weird as a numbers station

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Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by chillingeffect on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @04:33PM (#12491974)

I was trying to find a subreddit to help promote a friend's video when I found this and now check it every day:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepIntoYouTube

The rules are something like < 1000 views in six months. So it's all obscure stuff.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by Bartweiss on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @05:02PM (#12492200)

Strange subreddits are good. StumbleUpon isn't useful for much, but permitting tons of categories and going wild with it is a good way to get weird.

Anything that allows chaining is a big help, which is why people get to "the weird part of Youtube" more easily than the weird parts of the general internet. Sometimes you can exploit this by dipping in and out of linkable things (it's like recreating webrings). Try following chains of linked subreddits or tumblr accounts, then popping back out at some odd-looking link they point to.

But honestly, it's hard. I find a lot of 'weird internet' by reading the SlateStarCodex link collections, and otherwise letting other people do the hard work for me.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by throwawayReply on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @03:06PM (#12491275)

Data-mining reddit is often a good start.

reddit serves some very narrow niches and outlinks to some very curious places.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by elbigbad on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @03:18PM (#12491347)

Can you give an example of one of these curious places? Now I'm curious...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by jontas on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @03:19PM (#12491353)

I like this one:

https://www.reddit.com/r/internetisbeautiful

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by throwawayReply on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @03:24PM (#12491385)

That's one of the default subs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/defaults/comments/4l3svc/list_of_de...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by unimpressive on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @10:12PM (#12493804)

Sometimes people will deliberately manufacture an experience like this for a creepy story/etc, which can be fun.

Internet mythmaking in general ('creepypasta'/etc) is a fun rabbit hole to go down. Most are mediocre, but a handful of stories are genuinely brilliant:

http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/Psychosis

http://thebooksofsand.blogspot.com/

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Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by randomnerdiness on Tuesday September 13, 2016 @05:03PM (#12492209)

I used to enjoy perusing rationalviews.com - but it seems that they're shutting down.

Sorta bummed about that, but I get why. Too few people contributed to the discussions

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Re:The Death of the Cyberflâneur by zem on Wednesday September 14, 2016 @02:57PM (#12500148)

i feel like a lot of the freewheeling gibsonian stuff is happening on tumblr - it provides a relatively easy way to push content to the internet without overly constraining the form of that content.

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